Technical Reports - Query Results

We will show that the number of output units used in a
self-organizing map (SOM) influences its applicability for either
clustering or visualization. By reviewing the appropriate literature
and theory as well as our own empirical results, we demonstrate that
SOMs can be used for clustering or visualization separately, for
simultaneous clustering and visualization, and even for clustering
via visualization. For all these different kinds of application, SOM
is compared to other statistical approaches. This will show SOM to
be a very flexible tool which can be used for various forms of
explorative data analysis but it will also be made obvious that this
flexibility comes with a price in terms of impaired performance.